And Then There Were Ten
by Dracona Mortis
Summary: On a casual evening stroll through the woods, Isaac encounters a strange meteor, which in turn sends him tumbling head over ass into secrets he could never have guessed, and would have belonged in a children's TV show. But it's not all games and fun. He has to discover a lot of things, like why he was the one chosen to have this weird alien device attached to his wrist.


**A/N: Oh wow look at that a chapter done holy shit why did this take so long. Sorry for the wait, people that like this *you guys surprise me I'm not all that good* I had major writer's block. It's probably gonna take me another day to finish up chapter two and release that piece of crap as well, so.. Yeah. But you didn't come here for negative talk 'bout my writing, didja? HERE WE GO!**

Isaac was having a good day, especially after four years of terrible days. The Ishimura and then three years in an asylum, and then having to go through the Sprawl. Today was the "Anniversary" of when he had set foot on the Planetcracker a second time to find... her.. The engineer mentally kicked himself before he could start thinking about She-who-shall-not-be-named.

The night was clear of any clouds, leaving the full moon's light to illuminate the forest Isaac was walking through. He was glad there were no clouds, as he probably wouldn't have even considered going outside otherwise. The things he went through tend to make you not want to walk through a dark forest that's even darker at night.

But this night was pleasant, a cool breeze flowing through and rustling the trees, a plethora of colored leaves gently floating down to carpet the forest floor. It was October, a week before the 31st, where children dressed in costumes would go door to door for sweets and the like.

Isaac quite liked Halloween, as he didn't have to hide quite as much as he usually would have to. People would just assume he was in costume, and not think of calling EarthGov right away. Which was a great relief for him, as he wanted to stay at the house he currently resided in for as long as he could. It was a nice house on a small hill a bit away from the rest of the people.

The colony he and Ellie had decided to reside in wasn't nearly as polluted as the others they had been to before. It even had regular housing instead of cramped apartments. Isaac had read somewhere that the founders of the colony tried to make it as 21st century as possible, even complete with old, restored cars and buildings from that age.

It was a nice contrast to the usual way of life humans had, and Isaac especially liked the forest he took almost daily walks through. Peaceful and quiet, just the way he needed and wanted it. The best part: No Unitologists. The people on the colony detested Unitologists, having separate housing for the cult members to live in, far away from the regular colonists. Which he appreciated immensely.

Isaac sighed, watching various animals go about their business, the occasional squirrel or mouse giving him a wary look and wide berth. He seemed to have that effect on animals, even before the Ishimura. Eventually he just got used to animals being for some reason naturally scared of him, trying to leave them alone the best he could.

A strange light in the sky pulled Isaac from his thoughts of the effect he had on forest critters, and he looked up to see it streaking downward, towards a clearing much farther into the forest. Having nothing much else to do, he went to go investigate it, thinking it a meteorite or debris from a planetcrack, as neither were unheard of on small colonies like this one.

Arriving at the landing, he found a crater a little on the big side. A few fires decorated the sides of the steep crater, and the rim. He noticed a few trees ablaze, and another couple with their trunks broken in two, scorched branches spread around.

He looked back down to see a rather peculiar object resting in the middle of the impact. Isaac carefully slid down the side, making sure not to break something on the way. Avoiding a fire, he rest his eyes on.. Something.

The thing was spherical, with plates of metal overlapping each other one at a time. The metal was a reflective grayish silver, but odd. Odd because Isaac, an engineer that can identify pretty much any metal, didn't have the faintest clue of what kind it was. Not iron, not silver, not tin. It didn't appear to be painted, either, so it's color was it's natural one.

Isaac could not for the life of him figure out what it was, and did not like that one bit. He got closer to the sphere, about to inspect the two foot high thing, when it suddenly opened up, plates folding back into each other, until only the bottom half was left.

He jumped back at it doing this, then approached it more cautiously. With the top plates gone, Isaac could see what appeared to be.. A watch. Not a regular wristwatch, like the one Ellie had given him awhile ago, which was currently on his wrist, of course. More like one you would find in an old sci-fi movie, or a kids show.

Isaac finally went to pick it up, and turned it over in his hands. It was large enough to fit on his arm, but he couldn't find any way to see if it could be put on, not that he was going to or anything like that. The watch thing was white, black, and gray, with a slight circular depression smack dab in the middle.

Said depression had a bright green hourglass outlined by black, with the negative space on it's sides filled in with a dark gray, almost black. Then there was a rim around the depression, with four white rounded rectangles that formed a crosshair looking shape. Each white shape had a small green light in the middle, with the rest of the thing being black and gray.

Isaac was confused, to say the least. He had never seen a device like this, nor had he ever seen any metal or substance that was used in the thing. Finally he just decided to take it back to his house and tinker with it to see how it worked, his inner engineer's curiosity getting the better of him.

As he turned around to start walking back, the watch slipped out of his grip. Isaac almost caught it, his wrist bumping against it, causing the thing to open up and clamp down on his wrist, closing before he could yank it away from his arm.

Isaac turned his arm over to look at the bottom of the thing, worried to find that, as before, there was no way to open it. He picked up a thick stick that was nearby, not sure this would work but decided to try anyway, and stuck the point of the stick into the thing, trying to pry it off. He just ended up breaking the stick, like he thought would happen.

"Well... Shit." He muttered, pulling his jacket sleeve over the thing to hide it. Home first, take it off later was Isaac's thought as he set off at a brisk pace to get home as soon as possible.

Along the way, several things happened. He blamed the universe for hating his very being. It was actually more like he was distracted by several trains of thought that he didn't see where he was going and tripped over a considerably sized rock. This was when he tumbled ass over head into the dirt quite comically.

He still called out the universe and whatever god was out there, despite it being his own fault.

Grumpily the man sat up and huffed, still catching up with what just happened. It wasn't every day his face made love to the forest floor, y'know. After a few moments he stood up, wiping off the dirt his clothing had collected, and paused when he looked at the watch thing on his wrist.

The depression was no longer a depression but a display, and the glowing green hour glass had turned to a glowing green diamond. A silhouette was in the display, that silhouette being of a humanoid.. Thing.

"Huh.." Isaac grunted distracted, sitting back down to focus less on, well, _standing _and more on the device. With precaution he took the faceplate of the display and, to his interest, it turned. When it turned a new silhouette was revealed, a humanoid as well and equally fascinating. For the next few minutes the man just sat there in the dirt and leaves, trying to figure out what each silhouette was.

Out of pure engineer curiosity (curiosity killed the engineer, as they say) Isaac pushed down the display on the tenth, and presumably last, silhouette. His eyes were assaulted violently with a burst of neon green so bright his sense of sight couldn't handle it.

Next was the pain. Ooohhh lord the pain.

It felt like a group of doctors pulling off his limbs, rearranging the bone structure, reattaching the limbs, and then going through the process repeatedly. Isaac couldn't seem to open his eyes, and vaguely felt the barest sense of his body assuming the fetal position. Even the hells he waded through (quite literally) didn't cause as much physical pain as this in one burst. Jesus Christ it _hurt. _

What felt like five hours was actually about five or so seconds, and soon the pain faded away to nothing. Instead everything felt as if he had truly been taken apart and put back together, this limb feeling wrong, this other limb feeling completely out of place.

Bravely he opened his eyes, and it all seemed.. Normal. He looked around. Nothing wrong here. The man then looked down at his own body.

It was safe to say he probably couldn't be considered a _man_, per se.

"This is so wrong on so many levels..." Isaac inwardly shuddered at his voice. It didn't seem to be even coming from his nonexistent mouth. He looked up to see an odd device hovering over his head, moving as he moved. Looking back down at his body, he shuddered again.

His body seemed to be comprised of some sort of green slime, and the further in you went the darker it got. It also seemed to be constantly shifting, like an amoeba or cell. All and all, pretty.. Ew.

After a moment he took a few steps forward, and would have been grimacing if he could, the sound of his footsteps could be likened to walking around with dead but moving necrotic flesh stuck to your boots.

He hated when that happened.

"Alright.. Either this thing injected a psychotropic into my system, or I'm losing it big time." Despite his apparently liquid state, he stayed.. well.. Solid. The device floating above his head attracted his attention again, and he raised a finger to poke the thing. It wobbled in the air but stayed still. "Some sort of mini gravity projector..? Hmm.."

After awhile of standing around he had absently started to walk down the path back to his house before catching himself and stopping. "Woah woah woah Isaac, the hell you doin' man? Ellie's probably still awake. By some mysterious device you found in a crater you're now a walking puddle of green goop, and you're gonna walk right in like this?"

He didn't question why he was talking to himself.

"Though she's probably the only one that'll be able to help you, since she's the only person in existence that you _know _moderately well and hasn't _died_..."

Isaac looked back at where he had fallen, forward to where he could see his house in the distance, and repeated the process several times. Finally he made the decision, and started walking forward.

"Hooboy, this is gonna be a doozy.."

When he got home, he slowly opened the door and peeked inside. Ellie was on the couch watching a 21st century movie about aliens in a South African city. Damn that movie was good.

Carefully he took his first step into the house, making sure not to squish too loud, then the next foot, then quietly closed the door. The auburn haired woman sitting on the couch didn't even notice. Isaac could be sneakier than he gave himself credit for.

He glanced over to the closet he had repurposed into a small work space for tinkering and the like. Ellie had lovingly named it the 'Tinker Closet', always putting the sign she made for it back up on the door every time Isaac had tried to take it down. If he could get in there, then perhaps the device would run low on power and reverse whatever it did? Hopefully.

Isaac hoped to every deity out there (excluding one specific one *the Marker*) that he wasn't stuck like this.

He _really _didn't want to be a goop person for the rest of his life.

Putting his plan of getting to the closet in action, he oh so carefully stepped towards it, mentally grimacing at each squish of his "feet" that seemed deafeningly loud to him. Then he did something he wasn't expecting to do and had already done that night.

He fell.

Slipping on your own liquid yet solid body was easy enough, and he did it perfectly. So perfectly he nearly did a flip from the momentum he somehow built up before landing on the floor on his back.

"Fuck." At this point his cover was blown, so it didn't matter if he talked anymore. Ellie had of course heard the yelp he let out involuntarily as he fell, and then of course his swear. She got up on her knees to look over the back of the couch at Isaac, jaw slack and eyes wide.

"What the...?"

"Hi Ellie.." He waved from his place on the floor. The woman gave a slow wave, bewildered by what she was staring at.

"Isaac?"

"Yeah?"

"What the absolute fuck?"

"Surprise I'm actually a pile of green slime that can walk and talk. And has a little Gravity Projection device thing.." He stared up at the little hovering machine for a few moments before sitting up and looking at Ellie. She was bamboozled.

"No, really. Is this some joke, or..?"

"I wish it was."

"Explain."

"No idea how it happened."

An awkward silence followed, the two staring at each other. Ellie starting to slowly get a bit flustered that he wouldn't give her a straight answer of what the bloody hell was going on, and Isaac.. Well his emotion couldn't really be determined. The thing he had that could barely be called a "face" had only a pair of eyes, slightly glowing with no pupils or irises. Essentially bottomless pits of green. Just like the rest of him, though his eyes were bordered in black, giving them an almond shape.

"Are you absolutely sure this isn't some trick gone wrong?"

"Yes Ellie. I wasn't pranking you. You're the prankster anyway, remember?"

Another awkward silence.

"Isaac I'm having a hard time taking this in."

"Tell me about it."

"How about _you _tell me about it."

"Alright, alright.." He stood up and crossed his arms, facing Ellie. After metaphorically clearing his nonexistent throat, he told a summary of his latest walk through the woods. The ball of mystery metal appearing from _space_, the mystery watch appearing in the metal ball, the watch thing attaching itself to it's wrist, his little fall, and to sum it all up his grand mistake of pushing down on the display.

When he finished Ellie continued to stare at him with no discernible emotion on her face. He stared back at her, eyes blank as usual. Yet another awkward silence, though Ellie soon opened her mouth.

"Isaac if we didn't go through all that shit on the Sprawl I wouldn't believe you." She got up from the couch, walking around it to stand right in front of him. Isaac noted that he was taller, at least 6'7. Ellie poked him suspiciously, making a face as her finger went into him, and she quickly pulled it out.

"Well thank god. I thought you were going to shun me for being a-"

"Nerd."

Isaac huffed and stared at her with his... Rather soul piercing eyes. It got creepy after awhile. The pilot grimaced, "Alright alright, let's figure this out..."

~~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~~

*this means fucking HOURS LATER*

Isaac and Ellie had ended up sitting at the kitchen table, Isaac having the pilot write down his observations of the watch thing before he pushed down on the display since he was pretty much unable to write at the moment. Ellie gave a yawn, the first rays of dawn shining in through the window blinds.

"God Isaac, you've worked me to the *yawn* bone.."

"Sorry... At least we've gotten the bare concepts of what this thing can do, right?"

"You mean you do, I don't know all this nerd shit."

Isaac crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. He nearly jumped OUT of his chair when a sudden blaring noise came from the Gravity Projection thing, the top flashing red. Worry crossed both of their features, or at least emotion tried to traverse the abyss of the guy's eyes.

"Isaac the fuck does that mean!?"

"I don't know!"

"THEN FIGURE IT OU-" She was interrupted by a final, very bright (and violent) burst of red light. Isaac's body was once again racked with pain, pain, and pain as.. Something happened. He was vaguely aware of falling over in the chair.

Once the agony went away, he was able to hear Ellie yelling out to him and shaking his arm. Grumbling he blinked open his eyes and looked around. Then at himself. He gave a sigh of relief. Back to normal. After a few moments of sitting/lying on the floor he stood up and set the chair back up.

"Well I figured it out Ellie." Kind of.

"Good job, I'm proud of you. Now go to your room and think about what you've done."

"Accidentally get some foreign device stuck on my goddamn wrist?"

"Yes."

He rolled his eyes as she walked away to her room and closed the door, moments later literally crashing onto the bed. Isaac started to realize how tired he really was, and yawned while going back to his room and lazily throwing off his jacket and kicking off his boots.

Up on the bed he went, and out did his lights go.

**A/N: Wow I cannot write canon characters. Something about them having personalities that I didn't set myself makes it so hard for me to write decent dialogue, but HEY, I tried. What can ya do besides try, eh? Anyway, review if you feel like it, give me constructive criticism, tell me what I could do better and I'll try. Doop da doop Draco signin' out mofos I didn't get any sleep and I want to hit my head on my desk. *good lord draco you weeb***


End file.
